As May 4th rapidly approaches, we’re in for an onslaught of advertising and marketing for what’s sure to be one of the biggest movies of the year, as well as probably the biggest superhero movie event ever: Joss Whedon’s ‘The Avengers’. So far, we’ve gotten promo images, an official poster, and an iTunes record setting trailer, and now Marvel is going full circle by bringing the universe that they brought to the big screen back to the pages of their comic books.

Last week, The House of Ideas released the first issue of a limited series called ‘The Avengers Prelude: Fury’s Big Week’, which is meant to tie all the existing movies together in order to give a full back-story to the public (or at least the comic-reading public) before the film officially hits theaters. Since we’ve only largely seen Nick Fury, the director of SHIELD played by Samuel L. Jackson, in a scene or two here or there up to this point, this series takes a look at what he’s been up to while the events of ‘Iron Man 2’, ‘The Incredible Hulk’, and ‘Thor’ have been going on.

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

The book opens with a prologue that features the very end of ‘Captain America: The First Avenger’ where Cap goes down with a Hydra ship. Then, it jumps to the present where Director Fury, Agent Coulson, and SHIELD are attempting to locate the Captain. While planning what to do next with Coulson in regards to the expedition, the World Security Council shuts down the operation and calls Fury back to SHIELD HQ back in New York for a conference call.

Back in New York, while on the call, the Council outlines a new primary objective for SHIELD: Reigniting the Tesseract, better known to most as The Cosmic Cube. While Fury is in agreement, he’s not quite following what the Council is getting at. They explain to him that budgetary allocations will be reassessed so that the majority of equipment, funding, and manpower go towards the Tesseract project, rather than the various projects that Fury currently has in motion, such as excavating Captain America and keeping tabs on Bruce Banner and Tony Stark.

Alternate Cover Art

Fury exits the meeting looking cross and runs into Agent Coulson, who tries to defuse Fury’s foul mood. When asked what the plan of action is from that point on, Fury tells Coulson that they’ll be doing things the hard way to get what needs to be done done.

The rest of the book, titled Chapter One, focuses on the off-screen moments of Nick Fury from ‘Iron Man 2’, with brief mentions of Bruce Banner and a situation that Agent Coulson has discovered in New Mexico aka Thor’s hammer. If you remember the movie at all, I don’t really need to go into things.

Basically, the purpose of this series is to refresh the memories of fans going into ‘The Avengers’. However, if the rest of the series goes the same way as this issue, it’ll basically retell the events of the movies that we’ve already seen, with a tiny bit of new information that we wouldn’t have otherwise known about. The added bonus of this series though is that it gives us a better idea of the time frame that all these movies take place in relation to each other, which is nice to know if you’re a stickler for that sort of thing.

The prologue was good, but the rest of the book was information that I already knew from watching the movies. Despite not much of a new story here, I did like seeing Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson on the page. Agent Coulson was created for the movies; so seeing him in print was just something I found cool, especially since the artist captured his essence.

Overall, the book did what it was supposed to do in that it refreshed my memory to prepare for ‘The Avengers’ and it put more money in the pockets of Marvel Publishing, which is totally a good thing because, without the comics, we wouldn’t have any of these movies.

If the next issue preview at the end of the book is any indication, then I will probably enjoy the next issue more because it features The Black Widow and Hawkeye in the picture, along with Fury, Coulson, and another man who I cannot identify. Here’s hoping for some new Hawkeye stuff next time around!